


Absolvo

by chewysugar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Auror Neville Longbottom, Christmas, Depression, Draco Malfoy in the Muggle World, Drinking, Enemies to Friends, Gen, Guilt, Post-Hogwarts, Redemption
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 15:34:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12938304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chewysugar/pseuds/chewysugar
Summary: Draco has been alone since the Battle of Hogwarts--alone with nothing but guilt and regret. One day in December, the most unlikely person imaginable changes that.





	Absolvo

Draco’s holidays were always grey—they had been since he was a small child. In the upper echelons of the Wizarding World, there were no bright fairy lights or trees that burst into carols. All was silver and white—rigid and unfeeling as the blood flowing through his family’s pure veins. The gifts given always contained a subtle entendre of superiority or entitlement; he himself had been guilty of asking for and getting whatever he wanted without question for his ever deserving it in the first place.  
  
Reflecting on anything involving his past, however, never brought him any satisfaction—only deep regret. So it was that he didn’t deem the festivities this year as anything other than a painful reminder that he was well and truly on the outside. If it wasn’t the Muggles and their cheer and goodwill, it was the accoutrements of his world—a world he’d grown up believing to be superior, and learned through the worst possible means, was not.  
  
It was on a cloudy December day that he found himself, quite inexplicably, with a need to wander through the busy streets of a London all bedecked for Christmas. Abandoning his solitary flat—the one his mother and father had tried desperately to convince him not to move into—he walked, dressed in dark grey Muggle long-coat, a green Muggle scarf and polished black Muggle boots, feeling for all the world like a wayward spirit.  
  
His mother and father were abroad for the holiday—somewhere in Italy where they couldn’t be recognized for their ties to the all-too recent war. They’d sent him owls, yes, and had promised to floo on the day itself. But Draco was alone—entirely alone, and despite what he tried to tell himself, it was the most wretched position to find oneself in. No family; no friends—but when had he ever had friends?  
  
Crabbe, Goyle, Zabini and Parkinson? Sycophants and best, and despite the trauma at the loss of the former two, Draco couldn’t really say that he missed them all that much. He’d never had any friends—not even at the job he’d been able to scrounge for his disgraced name did he have friends.  
  
Draco wanted to sigh—but sighing indicated that an emotion was present to be lost. He himself felt numb—cold throughout and as bleak as the sky overhead. In the months following the death of Lord Voldemort, Draco had learned that it was best to retreat to this place of utter void. His memories of who he’d been—what he’d been—couldn’t hurt him if he chose the path of non-response; and he couldn’t hurt other people if he didn’t feel anything whatsoever.  
  
Of course the memories and accursed emotions were there—but Draco simply refused to feel them. Therefore he couldn’t quite understand why it was that he found himself thinking of the holidays, or his childhood, or even his own loneliness as he made his way, without any direction, down the street.  
  
All he knew was that he was suddenly, achingly, searchingly unhappy—the kind of unhappiness that demanded to be known; that lingered long after any attempt at resolution; that made a vulnerable child out of a battered, scarred young man.  
  
He had to escape it somehow; he couldn’t stand the sensation at all.  
  
Charring Cross Road was on the other side of the city; and Draco didn’t much fancy apparting in the state he was in. Knowing his luck, he would make for the grubby courtyard outside of _The Leaky Cauldron_ and end up missing the entire bottom-portion of his jaw. In any event, none of the patrons of London’s premiere wizard watering hole would take too kindly to his appearance. Not even Draco’s colleagues could stand to be around him for longer than several tense moments at a time.  
  
Entering a Muggle public house was something he no longer considered entirely beneath him. He was a wolf with a lame leg living among sheep with big enough horns to butt him backwards if he even tried to sink his teeth into them. At the very least, stopping for a libation, even at a Muggle establishment, would provide him with something of an escape—however brief that escape was.  
  
He entered the pub—which was low-ceilinged, dark and smelling of battered cod, and not a head—and there were a great deal many of them—turned in his direction. In his school days, Draco had anticipated the stares and adulation of his peers. These days, he was used to glares, looks of trepidation; even being outright ignored. It was something of a relief that none of the Muggles here, all drinking, eating and toasting the season, knew who he was; but again, it served to impress upon him his own isolation. Nobody was waiting for him here—no one would catch sight of him in the door and call “Draco, over here,” and invite him to join their table.  
  
Despite the crowd, Draco was able to find a place at the bar. He did his utmost to ignore the bright, multicoloured lights and wreaths strung upon the walls, or to hear the Christmas music playing from the wireless behind the bar.  
  
It all meant nothing to him, and, if he was being perfectly honest with himself, had never meant a thing. The holiday had been an empty occasion to get more needless attention from his mother and father; his gifts hadn’t been so much tokens of affection or presented for good behaviour as they’d been an inherent expectation. In all sobriety, Lucius and Narcissa had treated their one and only child as something of a treasured possession—an extension their name and of Malfoy Manor. Only when he’d been in danger of being taken had they truly seen him as something vital, something human.  
  
Now there was a tentative peace, existing as a result of Draco’s discovery of the fact that he and his parents worked better as a family the less time they spent in close proximity to one another.  
  
The bartender, a pretty, older Muggle woman, reached Draco from around the tightly compacted bodies of the other two people working the bar. She gave him a smile and said, “What’ll it be then, lovey?”  
  
“Stout. Ah, please and thank you.”  
  
The woman beamed, poured Draco a tall glass and moved on. The fact that she’d shown him any kind of attention should have made him, if not happy, at least acknowledged. But he’d spent so long under this cloud that it took a matter of seconds for him to tell himself that the woman was only doing her job, and that her smile was less born of being happy to serve him, and more out of fulfilling her obligation as hostess.  
  
Draco drank, pleased to find the dark liquid as potent as firewhiskey. The malty drink slid down his gullet, the one comfort he had in a life turned utterly vacant and hopeless.  
  
Nobody would be waiting for him at his flat. Nobody would be too bothered if he stepped in front of a double-decker bus, if it really came to it. He’d gone from thinking himself the centre of all surroundings to wishing he could flicker out of existence at will.  
  
Draco frowned as he took another long gulp of stout. The noise of the pub was so loud and intermingled with snatches of conversation that it made words impossible to distinguish; and yet he’d thought, momentarily, that he’d heard someone say his name.  
  
But that was absurd; either that, or he was finally going off his nut. Ignoring the sensation, he returned to his cups, inhaling the rich, oakiness of his drink.  
  
“Malfoy?”  
  
Draco paused. There could be no denying it this time: someone really had said his name, and from close at hand.  
  
Knowing that being recognized in public in the Muggle world of all places would not result in any kind of positive interaction, Draco finished taking the pull of his stout. He set his glass down and slowly looked round at the mystery haler.  
  
He expected one of his old Slytherin classmates; or even an auror demanding to know just who he thought he was, being in such a place as this.  
  
What he met was the surprised face of young man his age. The man’s handsome face split into a disbelieving grin; he obviously knew Draco, but Draco couldn’t place him anywhere in his memory.  
  
“Draco Malfoy! I thought it might have been you,” said the stranger. He had a head of neatly cut, sandy blonde hair, and warm brown eyes. He cut an impressive figure in the long-sleeved shirt he wore which, while not tight-fitting, still gave the impression of wiry physical strength.  
  
Draco blinked. Then, remembering that manners were still called for in this kind of situation, he inclined his head and said, “Er...hello?”  
  
“I never expected to see you again, especially in a place like this.” The stranger grinned.  
  
“Yes, well...I’ve been told I have a habit of doing things unexpectedly,” said Draco. He raked the stranger with his eyes; still the young man’s name eluded him.  
  
The stranger laughed, a sound that struck Draco like a slap to the face in its foreignness. “Unexpected? It’s practically taboo of you.”  
  
Draco narrowed his eyes. He had no idea who this man was, and he was starting to see why. If the stranger presumed to know so much about him, but didn’t stick out in Draco’s memory, then Draco didn’t much care to associate with him.  
  
Draco nodded again. “Yes, well...good seeing you again.”  
  
Something in the stranger’s gaze shifted; Draco felt as if the man had seen something that had altered his entire perception. He peered at Draco, and Draco, ruffled and slightly annoyed, raised his glass to his lips once more, trying to tell the man without speaking that he was quite done with this conversation.  
  
“You don’t recognize me, do you?”  
  
Draco shook his head.  
  
The man chuckled, and shook his head. “It’s bad enough you stole my remembrall in First Year. Now you steal my chance to rub all my accomplishments in your face.”  
  
Draco stared through the dense brown stout at the bottom of his glass. Then he choked as realization hit him like a bludger to the diaphragm.  
  
“L-Longbottom? Neville Longbottom?”  
  
Neville Longbottom let out a noise that Draco could only describe as a guffaw. “Changed a little bit since school, haven’t I?” he said.  
  
Change was an understatement. Of course, he hadn’t had a good look at Neville Longbottom since Sixth Year. He, as had many sixteen year olds at that point, had been growing into his body. But this specimen standing with a smile before Draco wasn’t simply a result of several years of puberty—it was nothing short of divine providence as far as Draco was concerned—or at least poetic justice.  
  
And then, most unsettling of all, there was the question of why Longbottom was even pleased to see him in the first place. Draco had been nothing short of tyrannical in his torment of the boy. He had to be gloating, showing off his leaner appearance and handsome face as a form of petty revenge. That, at least, was what Draco would have done had the shoe been on the other foot.  
  
Yet there was something about Longbottom’s smile and warm eyes that made it extraordinarily difficult for Draco not to give him the benefit of the doubt.  
  
“You look good,” said Draco without thinking.  
  
Longbottom laughed, albeit less vociferously than before. He took the barstool opposite Draco—when had that seat become vacant?—and swivelled in his direction.  
  
“Thanks. The job’s been helping loads.”  
  
“What, ah...what are you doing now?”  


The bartender—the same one who had filled Draco’s stout—plopped a pristine wine goblet filled with red wine in front of Longbottom, as if he were a regular—which Draco had no difficulty believing him to be.  
  
“I’m an auror now.”  
  
Draco’s left forearm itched in a momentary spasm of guilt. Neville cast a sidelong glance his way, as if he knew exactly what it was that Draco had just felt.  
  
“Don’t worry. I’m not on duty. I wouldn’t arrest you even if I was.”  
  
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” said Draco.  
  
“You’re at _The Daily Prophet_ now, aren’t you?”  
  
“Ah, yes...how did you know?”  
  
“Oh, I’ve got some friends on the inside there.”  
  
“In the printing department?”  
  
Draco didn’t mean to say the words aloud. To hear them was to admit that he had failed, in all things, even when there was no need.  
  
He quickly coughed and added, “I do well for myself with the family...” His voice trailed away, saying the word “money” seeming highly tack under present circumstances.  
  
Longbottom took a long gulp of wine, and wiped his lips on the back of his hand. His eyes never left Draco all the while, and Draco felt rather disconcertingly as if he were being subjected to an inquest. Really, Longbottom had grown to be a handsome man, and he carried his grown-upedness well—no artifice, just easy acceptance. It made it impossible for Draco, try as he might, to find something to detest about his old school victim.  
  
As if watching a film reel, he saw every instance of his wrongdoings against Longbottom—not only his own, but those of other Slytherin’s, and of one Severus Snape. He quickly swallowed down more stout, trying to drown the constricting guilt that rose in his throat. But the alcohol proved useless at suffocating the feeling.  
  
Draco took a breath, and kept his eyes on the myriad of bottles lining the shelves behind the bar.  
  
“Listen,” he said, searching for the words as if he were mining for something precious in a dark place, “I suppose it doesn’t mean much now but...I am sorry. For...you know...”  
  
Longbottom was still watching him, his eyes gauging Draco over the rim of his wine glass. Again there was a shift in his eyes, and again, Draco didn’t like it for it’s brazen knowingness.  
  
“No worries, mate,” said Longbottom after a moment.  
  
Draco eyed him. “You’re serious?”  
  
Sighing, Longbottom drank more of his wine. “I suppose not entirely,” he said. “Some of what you did...it’s the reason I’ve tried so hard...”  
  
“Is that a bad thing?”  
  
“Yes,” said Longbottom thoughtfully. Then, after a pause, he added, “And no.”  
  
Draco suddenly wished he hadn’t left his lonely flat after all. The tide of memory closed in, and he stared into his half-empty glass of stout, sinking into a maelstrom of his misdeeds.  
  
He felt Longbottom’s stare, but couldn’t face him. What in the world had he even been expecting? Longbottom was only surprised that princely Draco Malfoy had been reduced to dining with the Muggles. And Longbottom wasn’t gloating because he was the better man—had always been.  
  
“Malfoy.”  
  
Longbottom spoke with a sudden briskness that made Draco think of Minerva McGonagall.  
  
“What?” Draco drained more stout, emboldened by the fuzz it set across his senses.  
  
“Are you alright?”  
  
The hollow in Draco’s soul escaped him in laugh. Longbottom stilled, wine half-way to his mouth, his gaze suddenly fearful.  
  
“I’m living alone in a flat in Regent’s Park that could easily board a family of five,” said Draco. “I spend my days charming ink to the sports section of the Prophet when I’d rather be out reporting on the latest Puddlemere match. I don’t even have to do it, what with the pity gold Mother and Father have in my vault—I just do it because I thought I’d get a leg-up into the beat by now. Everyone who sees me either hates me, ignores me or waits for me to attack them, and all I really want is...”  
  
Again, Draco’s voice caught, this time far more pathetically than he cared to hear.  
  
Silence fell between he and Neville Longbottom; the pub continued to rail and cheer and sing in the season. Draco downed the rest of his stout, needing something to do, some kind of indication that he was making ready to leave this doomed reunion.  
  
“Well fuck,” said Longbottom. The unexpected curse was enough to rouse Draco to attention. To his memory, Neville Longbottom never swore. Longbottom half-rose from his seat and called, “Oi, Kat!”  
  
Kat, the bartender, returned, giving Longbottom an indulgent grin that, upon closer inspection under his less sober condition, Draco realized was also somewhat flirtatious.  
  
“Yes, lovey? Another Malbec?”  
  
“Not for me, thanks.” Longbottom jerked his head at Draco. “Another of your fine stouts for my friend here. And I’ll be footing the bill for the two of us.”  
  
“No,” said Draco abruptly. “Please, I really don’t—  
  
“I’m sorry, what part of this conversation sounded like I was asking your permission?” said Longbottom with a grin. He nodded at the still-hovering Kat. “Give him the best, Kat. He’s got a bit of the Christmas blues.”  
  
“Well he’s come to the right place to remedy that,” said Kat. She bustled off, and in a matter of moments Draco found himself the proud owner of a second tall glass of stout.  
  
He stared at the frothy head of his drink, heat rising into his face.  
  
Longbottom laughed. “You’re actually blushing! Chalk this up as my best victory to date.”  
  
“You didn’t have to do that,” said Draco quietly.  
  
“Bollocks,” said Longbottom decidedly. He was already getting out of his seat. “Consider it a Christmas present. You might not think yourself worthy of it, but consider this me judging you worthy. You’re not the same person you were in school.”  
  
“You can’t know that.”  
  
“Yes. I can. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t be here of all places; you certainly wouldn’t have talked to me.”  
  
Draco stared at Longbottom as if he’d been hit with a stunner. But Longbottom only smiled that million-galleon smile.  
  
“Merry Christmas, Draco. I’ll see you around some time, yeah?”  
  
Recovering himself, Draco nodded. “Yes. Thank you...Neville. Merry Christmas to you too.”  
  
Neville returned Draco’s nod, and then disappeared into the teeming crowd of the pub. A moment later, the bell above the door rang as Neville walked out into the frosty air.  
  
Draco looked back down at the new glass of stout. Really, it was such a small token, especially given the splendiferous gifts he’d received in childhood. But Neville had given it to him openly—without any expectation of receiving in return. He’d buried a seven-year long grudge that bordered on outright victimization, and all because...because he’d thought Draco had needed it.  
  
“Alright now, lovey?” Kat the bartender asked.  
  
Draco met her eyes, filled with a faint flicker of warmth that had nothing to do with the stout he’d already downed.  
  
“Yes,” said Draco. “It is, thank you Kat.”  
  
She smiled at him, and for the first time in his entire life, Draco found himself smiling a genuine smile right back.

**Author's Note:**

> Somehow Kat Slater ended up waltzing into this fic, despite my having only ever watched about eight episodes of EastEnders. 
> 
> Let me know what you think!


End file.
